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Photographs as well as telephones, smoke detectors, and other technological media
stepping into the slot of "revenants" and "fetches" confirm Ellis's view of "modernization"
rather than "dilution" of the supernatural in later traditional song.
10.3. "In heaven we'll meet again"
The romantic and Victorian age, Aries notes, held far morc belief in heaven than in
hell, even though theirs was a slightly "deviant" conception from the official one. From
the very diary of SiC Therese of the Child Jesus to American consolation literature, he
finds an above all secular and "domestic" heaven, one which, except for the cruelty of
separation, is a blissful transposition of earthly family life.! This accords with
Sparkes's memory of "heaven" for his own (Protestant) people at the turn of the century:
"What their conception of heaven was is not clear. I doubt if they bothered much about
its shape, size or position. A place of happy reunion and comfort is all they hoped for,"2
as for contemporaneous songs,
Dear Old Daddie of Mine 3
Shadows slowly falling among the whispering pines
For the light is burning in that cosy shack of mine,
I hastened on the pathway to see a face divine,
For waiting there to greet me is that dear old daddie of mine.
chorus: o daddie dear old daddie, you're be [indistinct] to me
Guiding my faltering footsteps wherever I may be,
When the roll is called up yonder the weeping parted time
I know we'll meet in heaven, 0 dear old daddie of mine
and epitaphs:
Great lmemol)' lapse] before me the sun begins to shine
There to greet me welcome is that dear old daddie of mine
His hair has turned to silver, his soul is still divine
He guides me from temptation, thus that dear old daddie of mine.
Three oI1Jhans miss your tender care
But plead to God for thee
In Heaven we hope to meet again
And live eternally.
1Aries, Homme 2: 145-6 and 59.
2Sparkes 154.
3MUNFLA R7-159/Cl064R; "The Orphans" is another case in point, MUNFLA 83-151, p. 35.